For the last 20 years, Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s have been a bicoastal couple sharing a checking account. Both fast food chains have virtually identical menus, though Carl’s Jr. resides on the West Coast and Southwest, and Hardee’s in the Midwest and along the Atlantic seaboard. Mental Floss offers some helpful context…

Wolfgang Puck is a famous chef, but he’s also the rare famous chef who actually blazed the trail in American gastronomy. Puck, Austrian-born and French-trained, help ushered in California cuisine in the 1980s—a genre of cooking that melded European and Asian influences with the seasonality of ingredients (back then…

Indie music geeks have long regarded Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea as a lo-fi masterpiece. Released 20 years ago this month, the album would go on to inspire a rock-folk genre not limited to guitar-bass-drums, but euphoniums, banjos, and singing saws (see The Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens).

The Chicago Sun-Times has earned its reputation as a fearless watchdog against political cronyism, patronage, and otherwise corrupt behavior. The paper’s latest investigation likely won’t shake City Hall to its core, but reporter Tim Novak may have just uncovered the Chicagoest story in recent memory .

We ginger ale/beer nerds are lucky to live in such a gilded age, with so many artisans brewing fantastic product (and none, for my money, as good as these folks). Sadly this means Canada Dry, likely our introduction to ginger ale many moons ago, has been relegated to the orthodox, the humdrum, the single cheese-less…

As long as I live, no genre of food will seduce me as much as dim sum, the tradition of steam/fried/baked small-plate dishes ubiquitous in my native Hong Kong. Because so many of us Cantonese decided to immigrate overseas in the 1980s and 90s, most major metropolitan with a healthy population of Chinese will have dim…

The Venn diagram circles of professional basketball writers and food writers overlap very little, but within that narrow sliver lies one journalist who’s covering the NBA-food beat better than anyone else: ESPN’s Baxter Holmes.

Eating lobster is a messy, labor-intensive, grotesque affair, one that involves the dismantling of exoskeleton in order to consume its scant meat. Unlike other animals we eat without a second thought, questions of morality come into play with lobsters—namely, whether these creatures are sentient enough to feel pain…

The first time I attempted a gumbo, I really earned that dang soup. It’s not that it was a complicated dish to execute, but it had required more stamina than I ever expected. Any Louisianan would tell you the step requiring the most effort is making the roux, which involves whisking flour into hot oil until the…